Tag: Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald has written a new book, No Place to Hide, that is getting great reviews. It's about the chaos in the hours and days following the Edward Snowden disclosures. The Guardian has an excerpt here. From Amazon's page on the book:

Now for the first time, Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.

[O]ne of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained and questioned for 9 hours at Heathrow today presumably for reasons related to Glenn's disclosure of the Edward Snowden documents. He is a Brazilian citizen who resides with Glenn in Brazil. He was detained under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

The law allows authorities to detain people at airports, border areas and ports for questioning in a terror-related investigation. Most interrogations last less than an hour, not 9. Also, police confiscated his "mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles." There is no right to an attorney during questioning, and refusal to answer questions is a separate criminal offense.

Glenn writes in the Guardian that the detention will have the exact opposite effect of the one intended by the Government.[More...]:

A few accurate and a great many inaccurate things have been said about Barack Obama's advovacy of a "new kind of politics." Especially amongst the media, this has been treated as "why can't we all get along" vapidity, a bland notion that people shouldn't be mean to each other.

The truth is that what he is advocating is far more subversive and dangerous to the status quo.